Resilient Spirit.
I lost ballet, my whole identity, to a depression no one had a name for yet. This is the honest account of the climb back.
About this book.
I grew up poor in Brazil, on the autism spectrum before anyone had told me so, bullied for being different, and the dance studio was the first place my difference felt like a gift instead of a flaw. Then I lost it. Not to an injury, the way the tidy version goes, but to a bipolar depression none of us could name yet, while the people around me decided I had simply gotten lazy and ungrateful.
This is the unvarnished account of how far down that went, including the night I sat on my bed staring at a bottle of pills, and the small, unglamorous things that pulled me back: a phone call to teach one ballet class, repairing wheelchairs at the Red Cross, a stage in Mexico that was not about me at all. If you are somewhere in your own version of this right now, I wrote it for you.
What you will find inside
- The night I sat on my bed staring at a bottle of pills, and the one small question that made me put it back
- Why everyone decided I was lazy and ungrateful while I was drowning in a depression we could not name
- The one room where being a poor, bullied, different kid from Brazil finally felt like a gift
- The phone call to teach a single ballet class that I almost did not take, and the moment the music started again
- Repairing wheelchairs and hospital beds at the Red Cross, and learning you do not have to be healed to be useful
Get your copy.
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$4.99 CAD
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Read it, and if you feel like you wasted five dollars, email me and I will send it back. No form, no questions.
Read it, $4.99 CADTambém disponível em português: Espírito Resiliente, R$ 19,99.
Read the story that started it all.
From career loss to life gain. The personal story that became the foundation for the book. Free to read, no purchase required.
Read for freeVlad Pereira.
Brazilian-Canadian on Vancouver Island. Former professional ballet dancer, choreographer of productions with hundreds of performers, raised tens of thousands for the Mexican Red Cross through staged work.
I wrote Resilient Spirit from the other side of the nights it describes, not because I have it all figured out, but because I needed someone to have handed it to me back then.
What I built on the other side of those nights, in the open, one small stream at a time, is the work I share now. Start here.